TWENTY-THREE
M onday night, before going to sleep, I text Jack.
Aleeza: How are you feeling tonight?
Jack: I’m sober, if that’s what you’re asking. I fucking hate it. You’re still coming with me to the police station tomorrow, right?
Aleeza: Yeah, absolutely. I’m doing some digging. We’ll have more to tell them tomorrow.
Jack: Okay. I’m bringing my family’s lawyer. Just in case.
Aleeza: Good idea. And Jack? You know you can call or text me anytime, right? Just to talk.
Jack: Thanks. Question: there’s more to you and Jay than what everyone sees, right?
I chuckle. I have no doubt there’s more to Jack than everyone sees too. Who knows? One day we may even be friends.
Aleeza: You’re perceptive. It’s not something I can explain, though. Go to sleep—I’ll see you tomorrow.
Jack: Yeah, night.
With my arms around Tentacle Ted, I finally get some sleep. It’s lonely without Jay here. All I can do now is try to get him some justice.
The visit to the police station in the morning is ... anticlimactic. Jack clearly expects the worst, which is why he brought the lawyer in the power suit. The police keep us waiting for a long time. When someone finally sits down with us, the detective barely seems interested. She eyes us suspiciously when Jack says he was high—she clearly doesn’t believe him when he says he had to have been drugged. She even calls him an unreliable witness, which, fair.
When I tell her about Lance’s connection to Jay through the scholarship and Helen Grant, she nods and writes it down but still doesn’t look interested. She says she’ll ask the yacht club for its video surveillance and will look into the Grant/Murray family. Mostly, she looks bored and annoyed that we bothered her. And she clearly isn’t willing to let go of the suicide theory.
Once we leave the police station, Jack’s lawyer takes off, and the rest of us—Gracie, Jack, and I—go to a local café that specializes in crepes and fancy hot chocolates for lunch. Aster meets us there. I don’t really feel like socializing, but I get the impression that Gracie’s trying to cheer me up—and maybe keep Jack with us so he doesn’t go home and drink to celebrate the fact that the police didn’t arrest him. We grab a table near the back with plush pink velvet seats, and order hot drinks. I get a hazelnut hot chocolate, but honestly, it tastes bitter to me. I’m just not in the mood for tasty things.
Aster shakes her head in awe after we fill her in on what happened at the police station. She’s in her soccer clothes again, and sits next to Gracie across from me. Jack lounges next to me and is, of course, wearing a suit. But this one is different from his others, the dark gray and the conservative cut much more subdued than normal.
“I’ve never trusted Lance,” Aster says, “but this is wild .”
“You’ll keep it all on the down-low, right, Aster?” Gracie asks. “The police said they don’t want us to say anything to Lance until they investigate.”
Aster nods. “Yeah, of course. Can’t say I’m all that surprised it was him.”
“How well do you know Lance?” Gracie asks her.
Aster shrugs. “Not that well. Bit of a himbo, isn’t he? Fucked his way through first year.”
Jack nods. “He made me seem like a nun last year. Surprised he settled down, actually. Doubt he’s faithful.” He looks at me, maybe remembering that it’s my former friend who Lance is likely cheating on.
Seems Lance is an actual player. Not like Jay, a player only by reputation.
I shake my head. “It’s so weird. I still can’t get over the fact that I lost my oldest friend because of him.” And lost Jay because of him too. I may not have known Jay as long as I knew Mia, but he meant just as much to me. More. I look down at my hot chocolate. The whipped cream is melting into an oily puddle.
What do I have now? No Mia. No Jay.
Gracie looks at me, head tilted. She knows exactly what I’m thinking. I smile at her. I do have new friends now.
“To be honest, none of this surprises me,” Jack says. “Lance is a dick. Lance’s dad is a bigger dick.”
“Yeah, you said on Saturday that his dad’s an asshole,” I say. “Have you had issues with him before?”
“Yeah, lots. When he found out I was the one behind that Instagram account, he tried to get my family kicked out of the club.” Jack snorts. “As if they’d ever kick my father out. All because I posted a picture that’s literally hanging on the wall of the club restaurant. It’s from, like, twenty years ago, from the club’s fiftieth-anniversary thing. I guess he didn’t like my caption.”
Gracie raises a brow. “What was the caption?”
Jack shrugs. “I don’t even remember.” He takes out his phone. “I archived all the posts, though.” After a few seconds, he chuckles, then reads his caption: “I wonder if Andrew Murray attached himself to this prominent family of lawyers because he knew he’d one day need his future ex-mother-in-law to help cover up that GHB possession charge. Doubtful—Andrew isn’t smart enough to be that strategic.” Jack laughs. “Honestly, not my best work, but wow, Andrew looks exactly like Lance in the picture—the idiot genes are strong in that male lineage.” He slides his phone in front of me to show me the picture.
I frown at Jack before looking at it. “What’s GHB?”
Jack snorts. “You really are an innocent, aren’t you?”
“It’s a drug, Aleeza,” Gracie says. She looks at the picture. “Wow, sea of white people.”
“It is a yacht club twenty years ago,” Jack says.
I look. The picture is of about a dozen teenagers standing beside a huge sailboat. It takes me all of three seconds to find Andrew and Denise with their arms around each other. I chuckle. It must be so awkward to have a picture of you with your ex-husband forever hanging on the wall of your yacht club.
“Wow,” Gracie says. “Lance looks exactly like his father. It’s uncanny, really.”
And then I see it. Gracie is right—the picture is a sea of white people. But there is an exception that catches my eye.
“Holy shit. Salma Hoque ,” I say, pointing to the screen.
It’s from twenty years ago, but one of the girls looks exactly like the woman I saw in the press conference, except younger. I zoom in. She’s kind of small, with really pretty, big eyes and brown skin. She’s standing with a tall, dark-haired teenager, who has his arm around her shoulders. He’s beaming . In fact, his smile seems borderline too big for his face.
I’ve seen him before. It’s Stephen Everett.
“Oh my god. She’s with Stephen Everett,” Gracie says, eyes wide. “That’s totally her. Do you think—”
I don’t know how I didn’t see it before. The resemblance is so strong. I lean closer to the screen, scanning the lines on the familiar face. “Stephen Everett is Jay’s father.”